Virginia Vandals Sentenced to Read Books

A sleepy Virginian town was outraged when five teenage boys were arrested for spray-painting the Ashburn Colored School with racist, sexist and anti-Semitic symbols. Instead of putting these lads in jail, a judge had a better idea. Reading books.

Judge Alex Rueda ― who has librarians in her family ― saw the act as a “teachable moment,” and assigned the young men book and movie reports in lieu of community service or jail time. They will also have to do a research paper on swastikas and attend a Holocaust Museum with their parents.

“They have to write either a book report once a month of they can substitute three of the books for a movie review, so I also gave them a list of approved movies that they can watch. And hopefully, what they get out of this year is a greater appreciation for gender, race, religion, bigotry. And then when they go out into the world, they are teachers.”

The judge is hoping that instead of just giving them probation, that reading will make these teens more emphatic. According to a study published in the journal PLOS ONE, losing yourself in a work of fiction might actually increase your empathy. Researchers in the Netherlands designed two experiments that showed that people who were “emotionally transported” by a work of fiction experienced boosts in empathy.

“In two experimental studies, we were able to show that self-reported empathic skills significantly changed over the course of one week for readers of a fictional story by fiction authors Arthur Conan Doyle or José Saramago,” they wrote in the findings. “More specifically, highly transported readers of Doyle became more empathic, while non-transported readers of both Doyle and Saramago became less empathic.”

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.